These are poems, stories, and personal commentaries about whatever I am going through in my life at the time. Please feel free to comment on anything that you read, as I love to hear from my readers. All written by Writer M Ray Holloway Jr.

I got a text from my son at 8:45 this morning; that's 7:45 where he lives, so I was impressed that he thought of me so early in the...

Friday, September 11, 2015

September 11, 2015: New Publication

Around thirty-five years ago, I wrote a short story based partially on some events in my life and partially on the "What if...?" syndrome. I read a lot, and particularly enjoyed it when the author talks about how he came up with his story. So many times, it comes from an every day event that provokes some thought and leads to the author saying, "What if this had happened instead?" The next thing you know, there is an interesting piece of fiction evolving.
James, the Empath is a character that I came up with during the time that I served as an interim youth pastor for my church. Many times, I knelt with a young person or another church member and opened my heart up to them while praying that God would grant me the message that would help meet their needs. Time after time, I felt that God brought to mind the very things that the person needed to hear. I began to think about what it would be like if someone could know completely what a person was going through so he could help them through their crises. Thus, James was born.
The story was not written very well back then, so I have completely rewritten it, and I am so pleased with the finished product. This story introduces James as a young man traveling through East Texas, offering his unique help to those he comes across. I have trouble putting my stories into categories, because they never seem to quite fit any of the choices I am offered, but I have listed this as Christian Fantasy. It is more in keeping with the kind of stories I like to write, where my first two stories were sort of unusual for me.
"The Empath" is now available on Amazon for Kindle for the outrageous price of 99 cents. I will probably put it out in a couple of weeks for free just to get it out there.

I have two projects up next and will probably work on them simultaneously. One is a re-release of a book of poems that I self-published back in 1996 that will contained some new material and if I can get them together, will have photos with each poem that represent the text. It is called "Encouragements" and features my best poetry over a period of thirty years.
The other project is a novel about time travel, but I think that it is not at all like your traditional story. Have you ever wished that you had done something different in your life? Most of us have some key point in our lives where we could have gone one way or the other, a fork in the road where we chose to go left and always wondered what would have happened if we had gone right instead. Ed Delaney is a brilliant theorist in temporal science and has done what everyone believed was impossible. He has created a machine to take him through time. While his business is thriving due to his discoveries, his home life is suffering. Ed begins to wonder what it would have been like if only he had gone down that other road....